--:-- Georgia Howe: This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID, and contact details. It's just one of the many places that has your personal info. And if any of them accidentally expose it, you could be at risk for identity theft. LifeLock monitors millions of data points a second. If you become a victim, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.
--:-- John Bickley: The stock market suffers its worst day since the Black Monday crash of 1987. I think you're going to have to kind of ride this through, honestly, the election, because I think the next four months with Trump and Kamala and whoever else she picks is going to create a lot of chaos. What's causing the chaos on Wall Street and will it lead to more fallout?
--:-- Georgia Howe: I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Tuesday, August 6th, and this is Morning Wire. The U.S. sends more ships to the Middle East as the world braces for an attack from Iran. And a judge finds Google guilty in a massive antitrust lawsuit over its search engine. No other search competitor is on the scale of Google. And that was part of the court's finding that scale contributed to Google being an illegal monopoly over search.
--:-- Georgia Howe: How will the decision affect the tech giant? Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
--:-- Georgia Howe: and receive a free no-obligation info kit to learn the role that precious metals play in your overall savings strategy. Again, text WIRE to 989898.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Global stock markets plunged Monday amid a record-breaking sell-off fueled by fears of a worsening U.S. economy. Here to discuss is Daily Wire Senior Editor Cabot Phillips. So a dark day for investors around the world yesterday. What did we just witness?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, to put it simply, global markets just experienced one of their worst 24-hour periods since the 07-08 financial crisis. The dark day kicked off when markets opened first in Japan, as the Tokyo Stock Index plummeted by more than 12%, the largest single-day drop since the infamous crash of 1987.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Within hours, the same happened in South Korea, prompting both countries to implement emergency circuit breaker mechanisms that halted all trading. The loss has then spread across Europe where every major market on the continent saw a decline. And then here at home, the results were much the same. Wall Street took a beating with all three major indexes falling more than 2.5%. The Dow dropped around 1,000 points while the NASDAQ also plunged, falling 1,000 points in a day for the first time ever.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: All told, more than a trillion dollars in U.S. stock prices were wiped out over one 24-hour period. So a lot of people obviously shaken by this. What led up to this chaos?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So there are a variety of factors. First, Japan raised interest rates, sparking a sell-off among already nervous traders. While domestically, many economists say the market was ripe for correction after a year of record-setting gains, especially in the tech industry.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: As turmoil spread yesterday, many investors were seemingly ready to take their profits and get out before things got more volatile. And according to some now ubiquitous trading algorithms also played a role in accelerating sell like the one we saw yesterday.
--:-- Kenny Polcari: A lot of the market action is driven by algorithms which are mathematical formulas. So every time they turn the algorithms on, when stocks trade off and hit different technical levels, that just causes more selling, right? Because all the algorithm knows is, okay, we broke this technical level, you got to sell more.
--:-- Kenny Polcari: And then stocks trade lower. Oh, it broke this technical level, you got to sell more. And it keeps doing that. So it feeds on itself. It creates then all this nervousness amongst the human beings in the crowd and everybody starts to panic.
--:-- Kenny Polcari: Pocari also pointed to last Friday's jobs report that fell well below expectations and really flashed warning signs for the labor market and the economy more broadly. It found the U.S. added just 114,000 jobs in July. That was well off the 175,000 projected by economists.
--:-- Kenny Polcari: It also showed wage growth falling to its lowest rate since May of 2021, unemployment ticking up to 4.3 percent. That's the highest point in more than three years, and job openings falling to their second lowest mark in three years. So concerning data really all around.
--:-- Georgia Howe: For their part, the Trump campaign was quick to blame the Biden-Harris administration for the chaos. Here's their latest ad titled Kamala Crash. Bidonomics is working. It's working. The stock market just taking a big old nosedive this morning. Dow Jones is down about 1,010 points. That is called Bidonomics.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So a lot of buzz about interest rates and an emergency meeting. How is the Fed responding to this crash? For the moment, they are sitting tight. Remember, critics said they were too slow to raise interest rates when inflation began to take off in 2022. and they're now saying they've been too slow to lower rates as things have cooled off.
--:-- Georgia Howe: A growing number of economists have called on the Fed to hold one of those emergency meetings to lower interest rates and hopefully bring some relief, but there are detractors of that idea, including Polkari. If the Fed calls it an emergency meeting, think about that for one minute. Emergency means panic.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I think it's only going to add more pressure to the downside because everyone's going to go, oh my God, the Fed called it an emergency meeting. That means it must be really ugly. And so I think it's the wrong decision.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, it's worth noting, there are certainly those who say recession is on the horizon, the market is overvalued, and that we're about to enter a major course correction that could take years to climb out of. But there are still plenty of economists with a more optimistic outlook who encourage folks to zoom out and remember that even with this week's massive sell-off, markets are still above where they were at the start of the year.
--:-- Georgia Howe: I think in the end, history will show that it'll be a blip on the market. The same way if you look at 1987, the market dropped 22% in six hours, right? But if you go back and you look at the chats now, that was a blip on the map. And so this will be too in my mind, but I don't think it's time to go, oh my God, and light your hair on fire and sell everything you own.
--:-- Georgia Howe: What are you worried about if it's a long-term investment account? You have nothing to worry about. Time will tell if this is indeed a blip on the radar or the beginning of a prolonged downturn. But in the meantime, do not check your 401k. Yeah, good advice. Kevin, thanks for reporting. Anytime.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: Israel is preparing for an impending attack from Iran after a series of escalatory actions from Iran proxies Amid the rising tension a rocket attack targeting an air base in Iraq on Monday injured U.S. troops. Joining us to discuss is Aryeh Lightstone, senior advisor to the former U.S. ambassador to Israel. Thank you so much for coming on, Aryeh. So first, a series of major events have unfolded related to Iran and Israel, including a heinous attack by Hezbollah.
--:-- Aryeh Lightstone: So the last several days have involved some consequential decisions by all of the leadership that's involved, both Israel, Iran and around the world. And one of the things to set the stage is Prime Minister Netanyahu went to the United States of America, spoke in front of Congress, had a meeting with President Biden, had a meeting with Vice President Harris and had a meeting with former President Trump and candidate Trump on a Saturday night while he was still in the States.
--:-- Aryeh Lightstone: Hezbollah attacked the Golan Heights, killing 12 Druze, not Jewish, Druze, Israeli citizens, all kids. In a horrific attack, the most amount of civilian casualties since the war began. As a response, Israel successfully took out three arch terrorists, one in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, one in Damascus, the capital of Syria, and one in Tehran, the capital of Iran.
--:-- Aryeh Lightstone: All three of those are terrible human beings. The world is far better without any of them there. But the world has reacted an outcry for Israel escalating the cards. And what has happened since the world decried Israel for escalating the situation, Iran has been making larger and larger threats towards what they and their proxies will now do to Israel to exact revenge for the killing of, in the case in Tehran, of Haniyeh, the political head of Hamas.
--:-- Aryeh Lightstone: And we've learned from some leaks, apparently, to the press about Biden's comments to Bibi. Can you unpack that for us? Yeah, so the comments that were leaked, and it was just important to know where it's leaked, it's leaked from Axios. And Axios, for the last at least 12 months, likely a better part of the last two and a half years, have been the method of communicating when the White House wants to send a message that they won't put out in the public communication.
--:-- Aryeh Lightstone: The leaks that Axios gets from the White House have so far been almost 100 percent correct. So let's treat them as alternative ways that the White House wants to distribute a message. And the message was Biden talking tough against Bibi and Biden specifically saying where America will and will not defend Bibi in war and not Israel in a war, not the U.S.-Israel relationship, but cursing at Prime Minister Netanyahu and then explaining that if Bibi continues to escalate, the United States of will not be with the state of Israel in the process of those escalations.
--:-- Aryeh Lightstone: I know it's impossible to predict, but what do we expect to happen over the next few days? Do we expect a strong response from Iran? We will expect something from Iran. I think the outside window is a week from Tuesday. The inside window is within the process of this being recorded right now, again, within the next several hours to up to an entire week away.
--:-- Aryeh Lightstone: And what most intelligence analysts are predicting is that this response will be far more than the Iranian response on April 13th, 14th, which involved over 300 ballistic missiles and drones launched from Iranian territory at Israel. And if something like that occurs, how do we expect Israel to respond? I believe that two things will have to occur. Number one is let's hope that there is no damage within Israel.
--:-- Aryeh Lightstone: And then Israel has full freedom of when, where and how to respond. If God forbid, there is meaningful damage in Israel then Israel will have no choice but to directly attack meaningful assets within Iran that would include their nuclear program and their oil and gas production
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well the world eyes once again on the Middle East Aryeh, thank you so much for coming on.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Google was found guilty in a historic antitrust case on Monday. A judge ruled that the tech giant illegally paid to maintain dominance by securing exclusive deals with tech platforms like iPhone and Android. Joining us to discuss the ruling is Rachel Bovard, vice president of the Conservative Partnership Institute. Rachel, thanks so much for coming on.
--:-- Rachel Bovard: Sure, happy to do it. Thanks for asking.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So let's break down this ruling. What are the key points in the ruling against Google? So the court really focuses in on their search exclusivity agreements. There's a lot of other complicated factors in this ruling, but the key to the ruling was the ability of Google to be the default search engine across a number of platforms.
--:-- Rachel Bovard: So basically every platform except for Microsoft in the browser market and almost every single mobile platform. And what that means essentially is on mobile devices, Google has paid the mobile company, be it Apple or Android, which Google itself owns, to make Google the default search engine in such a way that consumers will not use another search engine.
--:-- Rachel Bovard: So simply because Bing exists, because DuckDuckGo exists, is not enough in this case to say there's no monopoly. It's because Google has paid to be the default search engine across mobile devices and browsers. But I do think it's important to understand that Section 2 of the Sherman Act is what was violated here.
--:-- Rachel Bovard: It's not illegal in the United States to be a monopoly. But what's illegal is to maintain that monopoly through illegal and anti-competitive means. And so that's a big distinction that gets lost in the discourse a lot. So Google was found liable for behaving in a way that maintained a monopoly with illegal means.
--:-- Rachel Bovard: Just being big is not the issue here. It's the fact that they excluded competitors from the marketplace in a way that nobody could compete with that's at the root of this case. And how significant is this decision in the context of past antitrust cases?
--:-- Rachel Bovard: This is a huge case on par with the Microsoft antitrust case, which is probably the most familiar to people. this raises to that level, mostly because it's also dealing with the new technology. It's saying that you can actually have a monopoly over search, which is what the court found here.
--:-- Rachel Bovard: And it's also calling into question, you know, across a number of industries where big competitors have exclusionary agreements with other platforms or other companies. It's calling into question all of those agreements as well, essentially asking the question, is it an illegal maintenance of a monopoly to pay off people to use your product in such a way that others cannot compete with it.
--:-- Rachel Bovard: Now, in the context of free speech, because Google has been accused of trying to control the flow of information, does this have the potential to free up some of the stranglehold Google has on online discourse? So there's not an absolutely direct link, I think, between Google's maintenance of this monopoly and sort of the flow of information and how Google hamstrings that.
--:-- Rachel Bovard: But I do think a side effect of this will, by way of allowing consumers to actually choose the options for their search engine on their phone from the many options available to them in the market, it will allow other inputs into the search marketplace in a way that doesn't happen right now because Google is the default search on so many phones.
--:-- Rachel Bovard: So the speech outcomes, I think, will be indirect, but I do think they will be there. All right. Well, Rachel, thank you so much for coming on and explaining that for us.
--:-- Georgia Howe: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That was Rachel Bovard, vice president of the Conservative Partnership Institute. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with more news you need to know.
